The Front Royal Entrance

The entrance station is just ahead, so have your card ready. No cash here. Just past it, on your right, are several Kentucky coffee trees, rare up here. You came in at the bottom. Highway three forty was mile zero, about five hundred and ninety feet above the sea, the lowest point on the whole Drive, and from here the road climbs more than three thousand feet. It's also the only place in Shenandoah where the deep rock is limestone, and you'll never see it, because soil and rubble washed off the ridge have buried it. Most people drive right by this one. At the pullout at mile one point four, on your right, cross the Drive and go about a hundred feet uphill, then look left. There's a cascade there some sixty feet high. It's at its best in spring or after heavy rain, and it can be completely dry in summer. Watch for the cement posts on your right. Those mileposts are your clock for the rest of the day, and every place on this tour has a number. One thing to carry for the rest of the road. This is going to look like old wild forest, and it isn't. A historian of this road wrote that no area within immediate view of Skyline Drive is natural. Crews pulled out dead chestnuts, thinned what grew under the trees, fought an invader called tree of heaven for eight years and largely lost, and planted hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs. The views are gardened too. Seventy-six overlooks were built with this road, and every one has to be cleared of trees and shrubs, inside the edges it was first cut to, or the forest closes it. Even the shoulder is a garden, a long strip of suburban yard running along the crest. Keep an eye on that grass. Woodchucks, rabbits and deer graze it, and ruffed grouse stand frozen at its edge while the cars go by.